Existing multi-view methods, which either reconstruct each subject in isolation or merge nearby 3D surfaces into a single unified mesh, often fail to capture the intricate geometry between interacting bodies and exploit on datasets with many views and a small group of people for training.

A mysterious black cube has joined the chilling list of objects spotted hovering over the US during last year's drone invasion. Newly released government reports have revealed five incidents near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio that have never been disclosed since the swarms of UFOs were seen along the East Coast in late 2024. Along with several sightings of unidentified drones around the secretive Air Force base in December 2024, federal officials now say a'black cube'-shaped craft was spotted by a nearby airplane less than 80 miles from Wright-Patterson. Witnesses of the strange object sent their claims to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on December 19, describing how the cube was flying within 500 feet of the plane, which was soaring 16,000 feet above the ground. This would make it incredibly unlikely to be a commercial drone, since those types of devices fly only a few hundred feet above the ground.

Gravitational wave (GW) interferometers, detect faint signals from distant astrophysical events, such as binary black hole mergers. However, their high sensitivity also makes them susceptible to background noise, which can obscure these signals. This noise often includes transient artifacts called "glitches" that can mimic astrophysical signals or mask their characteristics. Fast and accurate reconstruction of both signals and glitches is crucial for reliable scientific inference. In this study, we present DeepExtractor, a deep learning framework designed to reconstruct signals and glitches with power exceeding interferometer noise, regardless of their source. We design DeepExtractor to model the inherent noise distribution of GW interferometers, following conventional assumptions that the noise is Gaussian and stationary over short time scales. It operates by predicting and subtracting the noise component of the data, retaining only the clean reconstruction. Our approach achieves superior generalization capabilities for arbitrary signals and glitches compared to methods that directly map inputs to the clean training waveforms. We validate DeepExtractor's effectiveness through three experiments: (1) reconstructing simulated glitches injected into simulated detector noise, (2) comparing performance with the state-of-the-art BayesWave algorithm, and (3) analyzing real data from the Gravity Spy dataset to demonstrate effective glitch subtraction from LIGO strain data. DeepExtractor achieves a median mismatch of only 0.9% for simulated glitches, outperforming several deep learning baselines. Additionally, DeepExtractor surpasses BayesWave in glitch recovery, offering a dramatic computational speedup by reconstructing one glitch sample in approx. 0.1 seconds on a CPU, compared to BayesWave's processing time of approx. one hour per glitch.

Radio remains a pervasive medium for mass information dissemination, with AM/FM stations reaching more Americans than either smartphone-based social networking or live television. Increasingly, radio broadcasts are also streamed online and accessed over the Internet. We present WavePulse, a framework that records, documents, and analyzes radio content in real-time. While our framework is generally applicable, we showcase the efficacy of WavePulse in a collaborative project with a team of political scientists focusing on the 2024 Presidential Elections. We use WavePulse to monitor livestreams of 396 news radio stations over a period of three months, processing close to 500,000 hours of audio streams. These streams were converted into time-stamped, diarized transcripts and analyzed to track answer key political science questions at both the national and state levels. Our analysis revealed how local issues interacted with national trends, providing insights into information flow. Our results demonstrate WavePulse's efficacy in capturing and analyzing content from radio livestreams sourced from the Web. Code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://wave-pulse.io}.

Creating human-like large language model (LLM) agents is crucial for faithful social simulation. Having LLMs role-play based on demographic information sometimes improves human likeness but often does not. This study assessed whether LLM alignment with human behavior can be improved by integrating information from empirically-derived human belief networks. Using data from a human survey, we estimated a belief network encompassing 18 topics loading on two non-overlapping latent factors. We then seeded LLM-based agents with an opinion on one topic, and assessed the alignment of its expressed opinions on remaining test topics with corresponding human data. Role-playing based on demographic information alone did not align LLM and human opinions, but seeding the agent with a single belief greatly improved alignment for topics related in the belief network, and not for topics outside the network. These results suggest a novel path for human-LLM belief alignment in work seeking to simulate and understand patterns of belief distributions in society.

Natural language (NL) has long been the predominant format for human cognition and communication, and by extension, has been similarly pivotal in the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, besides NL, LLMs have seen various non-NL formats during pre-training, such as code and logical expression. NL's status as the optimal format for LLMs, particularly in single-LLM reasoning and multi-agent communication, has not been thoroughly examined. In this work, we challenge the default use of NL by exploring the utility of non-NL formats in these contexts. We show that allowing LLMs to autonomously select the most suitable format before reasoning or communicating leads to a 3.3 to 5.7\% improvement in reasoning efficiency for different LLMs, and up to a 72.7\% reduction in token usage in multi-agent communication, all while maintaining communicative effectiveness. Our comprehensive analysis further reveals that LLMs can devise a format from limited task instructions and that the devised format is effectively transferable across different LLMs. Intriguingly, the structured communication format decided by LLMs exhibits notable parallels with established agent communication languages, suggesting a natural evolution towards efficient, structured communication in agent communication. Our code is released at \url{https://github.com/thunlp/AutoForm}.

The barren plateau phenomenon, characterized by loss gradients that vanish exponentially with system size, poses a challenge to scaling variational quantum algorithms. Here we explore the potential of warm starts, whereby one initializes closer to a solution in the hope of enjoying larger loss variances. Focusing on an iterative variational method for learning shorter-depth circuits for quantum real and imaginary time evolution we conduct a case study to elucidate the potential and limitations of warm starts. We start by proving that the iterative variational algorithm will exhibit substantial (at worst vanishing polynomially in system size) gradients in a small region around the initializations at each time-step. Convexity guarantees for these regions are then established, suggesting trainability for polynomial size time-steps. However, our study highlights scenarios where a good minimum shifts outside the region with trainability guarantees. Our analysis leaves open the question whether such minima jumps necessitate optimization across barren plateau landscapes or whether there exist gradient flows, i.e., fertile valleys away from the plateau with substantial gradients, that allow for training.

Identifying reaction coordinates(RCs) is an active area of research, given the crucial role RCs play in determining the progress of a chemical reaction. The choice of the reaction coordinate is often based on heuristic knowledge. However, an essential criterion for the choice is that the coordinate should capture both the reactant and product states unequivocally. Also, the coordinate should be the slowest one so that all the other degrees of freedom can easily equilibrate along the reaction coordinate. Also, the coordinate should be the slowest one so that all the other degrees of freedom can easily equilibrate along the reaction coordinate. We used a regularised sparse autoencoder, an energy-based model, to discover a crucial set of reaction coordinates. Along with discovering reaction coordinates, our model also predicts the evolution of a molecular dynamics(MD) trajectory. We showcased that including sparsity enforcing regularisation helps in choosing a small but important set of reaction coordinates. We used two model systems to demonstrate our approach: alanine dipeptide system and proflavine and DNA system, which exhibited intercalation of proflavine into DNA minor groove in an aqueous environment. We model MD trajectory as a multivariate time series, and our latent variable model performs the task of multi-step time series prediction. This idea is inspired by the popular sparse coding approach - to represent each input sample as a linear combination of few elements taken from a set of representative patterns.

Should we be concerned about our voice being sourced for AI audiobooks? Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson delves into the new technology. Do you love reading yet struggle to find the time for it? Don't worry, you can still enjoy a good book without having to sit down and read. Audiobooks are a convenient way to experience a good story while you're doing other things.